More Mobility, More Sales

Service industries have long had their finger on the pulse of what many red-blooded American customers value: convenience, speed and consistency. Why else would companies like Starbucks have propagated into an on-every-street-corner latte standby for the masses?

So it makes sense for distributor salespeople to employ some of those same concepts in appealing to their own busy customer base. One way many distributor salespeople have done this is by integrating laptops, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and corresponding software into their sales-call strategies. And it appears to be an effective sales method, for more reasons than one. Not only are these tools providing salespeople resources that make selling easier, manufacturers are constantly working to provide new, cutting edge innovations in response to customer demand.

Many distribution software manufacturers — DDi System, Stanpak Systems, Intuit Eclipse, Maytech Computer Systems, and Step One Business Products, to name a few — have designed systems that give on-the-go sales reps unique and far-reaching capabilities. Salespeople can enter orders, view sales histories, provide up-to-date pricing information, check inventory and learn credit information, all on their laptops or PDAs.

Each manufacturer’s offering is a bit different, but most address the same goals: making salespeople more efficient, effective and productive.

What’s Out There?
Ed Mazer, president of Stanpak in Suffield, Conn., believes his software, called SalesFORCE, helps jan/san sales reps sell more product, and increases profitability through increased efficiency. “They have full access to a customer’s purchase history, pricing, and product information as they make their calls,” he says. “The sales rep can even pop up product pictures right on the notebook screen and display that to the customer.

“Our software takes all of the information in the enterprise business server, drives it out remotely to the sales rep and puts it in front of his customer.”

Mazer estimates that 30 percent of the company’s customers have sales forces using relatively new notebooks. “We have thousands of them out there and people are happy with them. Some say the notebooks are bulky to carry around. But compare them to your PC or your old laptop, which weighed about 13 pounds and seemed to take forever to boot up,” he says.

Mazer says customer feedback has prompted his company to make their software a little faster, a little more intuitive — to allow sales reps to review new orders, to do things remotely that they used to come into the office to do. “So we’ve made our software more valuable.”

Mobility Matters
Adam Waller, president of DDi System in Sandy Hook, Conn., believes his company’s mobile sales tool, sLAP (sales laptop), provides users a new way to improve sales.

“sLAP is an order-building, customer-service tool,” Waller says. “Salespeople in the field can create sales orders and price quotes. They can improve customer retention and repeat sales, while facilitating the flow of information.”

And laptops are important to distributor sales. Customer feedback shows increased “laptop loyalty” — distributors are buying them and swearing by their effectiveness.

Waller says that sales personnel are also more adept than ever at using laptops and pocket PCs. “Manufacturers have given sales personnel tools to do things with more sophistication,” he adds.

“What we’ve done for our distributor customers is provide them with a tool that does predictive sales analysis. With our software, you can know what your customer buys regularly because you’ve been recording their buying habits. And when you’re at a customer’s location, the order pad display comes up and shows their purchases, which are color coded — the red items are ‘due to buy’ items that you need to promote,” Waller explains.

“That’s what computers are really good at — recording and communicating those critical details. Think about what people used to do — print out multi-page reports, and flip through all those pages while sitting in their cars just to find key information. Now it quickly appears on your screen while sitting there with your customer,” he explains.

“What’s driving [sales force automation] is putting customer service at the front line, out there where the salesperson is meeting with his customer.”

Waller is optimistic that mobile sales software has a good future. “About 20 percent of our distributor customers are using our product, which was introduced just last March. “That’s a remarkable rate of adoption for a new product that’s not free of charge.”

Maytech Computer Systems has also created laptop tools geared to mobile sales forces: Specialized Distribution Software (SDS) and Graphical Distribution Software (GDS ), according to Dave Gust, general manager of the San Antonio company.

“Right now we have about 900 notebooks in the field with customer sales reps and we know that they’re taking advantage of both our customer service software and our graphical presentation software. And we’re beginning to see PDAs grow in popularity. We have about 50 of them out there with our customers’ sales reps. Our graphical software, however, isn’t for PDAs,” Gust says.

Wise Investment
Bob Hestenes, president of Step One Business Products, Los Angeles, specializes in selling to jan/san distributors. “We’ve sold hundreds of laptops to them. Every owner who has invested in them tells us that they’ve paid for themselves many times over,” he says. “At least 70 percent of our major distributors have laptops for their salespeople,” Hestenes says.

“One of the biggest things about Step One Portable Salesman, our laptop software, is that it keeps track of the consumption patterns of distributors’ customers. It tells the sales rep what he or she should be focusing on when talking to the customer. It has all the pricing and cost information on all inventory items and can help get those order sizes up.”

Headquartered in Shelton, Conn., Intuit Eclipse, formerly Eclipse Inc., has developed both laptop and PDA software to enhance the effectiveness of mobile sales personnel.

“I’m seeing higher interest in the jan/san sector than in our other vertical markets,” says Jay Walther, marketing manager. “Quite a few — more than half of our jan/san customers — have used our Sales Force Automation (SFA) product for laptops and Pocket SFA for PDAs,” he says.

Walther says salespeople love to use laptops. “They’re easy to carry around, they say, and they believe that they make them more productive.”

Intuit Eclipse uses the Internet to train people on its SFA products, which work with PDAs. “We’ll do a two or three-hour Webcast to help distributor salespeople familiarize themselves with the tools,” he says.
Like his counterparts in the software manufacturing game, Walther sees a bright future for mobile sales software. “I see good demand. Any way you can give information and tools to a salesperson that will make it easier to do the job and be more professional, you’re going to reap the benefits.”

Popularity of PDAs
While laptops and laptop software have become standbys among distribution sales professionals, PDAs are becoming an increasingly attractive alternative — or complement.

“I think the notebook is an absolutely perfect solution for some,” says Mazer. “But I also think the PDA or pocket PC offers many of the same capabilities for less money, plus the ability to go wireless and be much more mobile,” he adds.

“A certain segment of the notebook market — those who paid a lot of money for them and regretted doing so — will want to spend less for pocket PCs when it’s time to buy more. And those who like the more in-depth control aspects of the notebooks will stay with them,” he adds.

Gust agrees that PDAs offer numerous advantages.

“I’ve been seeing an influx of people asking for PDA-based software giving them the same capabilities a laptop has,” Gust says. “In some cases PDAs are less expensive than a laptop and fire up faster. With a PDA all you have to do is hit the on button and you can immediately start accessing data or key in an order.”

Step One has experienced the increased demand for PDAs first-hand, and attributes their popularity to their convenient size and lower cost. “Practically all of our distributors have ‘palms,’ and sales of Step One Palm Salesman, our software for these, have been growing significantly,” Hestenes says. “Everyone who has heard about it wants it.”

“I think that a lot of the business that has initially gone to the notebook will migrate to the pocket PC,” predicts Mazer, whose company offers software for both tools. “I don’t think the notebook market will shrink; I do think the pocket PC market will expand.”

Jordan Fox is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer.
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